Category: Library

Well, another month, another season and another friend’s renovation project (my friends are big into tearing down walls!) has just wrapped up. This was a special project in that it’s a house I practically grew up in, owned by a woman who had a huge role in shaping the person I am today. The house is completely changed – all for the better – and this friend, too, is planning to dedicate an entire room to books. While a beach house is obviously a place for summer reading – the lake house has always made me think of Fall and changing leaves and the romance (though not the practicalities!) of a wood burning stove.

This is definitely the library for large, heavy hardcover door-stopper novels. And knowing the tastes of the people who’ll be using it, it’s also a place where I imagine edge worn sci-fi paperbacks by Jack Vance & Fritz Leiber side-by-side with contemporary examples of narrative non-fiction. A whole row of cookbooks and a stack of…. enough. Let’s do this right.

A subscription to The New York Review of Books – perfect for Saturday morning reading between sips of coffee.

Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall & Bring Up the Bodies for all the obvious reasons.

The Complete Annotated Short Stories of Sherlock Holmes (W.W. Norton) – They’re huge, unwieldy and don’t make for the most comfortable reading, but I’m partial to the annotated volumes in this boxed set.

Jack Vance, Fritz Leiber, Douglas Adams and that guy who wrote the Conan the Barbarian series – classic American sci-fi and fantasy. I always feel nostalgic in the Fall.

Murakami – not 1Q84 so much, though I don’t rule it out of hand. I’m thinking of his earlier books with their themes of isolation and loss.

I know Cloud Atlas is EVERYWHERE at the moment so I won’t insult you by recommending it. A novel by David Mitchell is perfect for this (or really any) time of year. I wonder if they were written while the leaves changed color? The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet or Black Swan Green… reader’s choice.

The Hangman’s Daughter mystery series from Germany – decidedly middle-brow, but well done and a lot of fun for all that

I still haven’t discovered cookbooks I like better than The Canal House Cookbook series. New books come out twice a year. An added (and, admittedly, obvious) benefit is that you can read them while cooking up a fabulously delicious meal.

Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume One should have a permanent spot on the table next to your favorite reading chair. Just waiting for you to dip into on a long, cold night. A cat and a snifter of brandy is recommended but completely optional.

Any book from the collection of authors born out of the imagination of the French author Antoine Volodine. I’ll be reviewing We Monks & Soldiers by Lutz Bassmann later this week. Atmospheric and strange and more than a little bit creepy.

Do you have a favorite book for this time of year? Something you recommend for when the nights begin to turn cold?

Reading has been slow these last few weeks. So my apologies, dear readers. More reviews are in the works – promise.

I’ve been thinking a lot about personal libraries of late, and not just my own (though I do have design drawings for bookshelves I’m planning for the living room). It started with Phantoms on the Bookshelves, which made me reconsider the value of a working over a collector’s library. Now a friend is renovating a beach house and plans to dedicate an entire room to books. Doesn’t that sound brilliant? She loves to entertain, travels a lot and has friends from all over the world who will be coming to enjoy the ocean. My solution? A library built almost entirely of paperbacks that can be taken back and forth from the beach – with an emphasis on international and translated authors. Nothing to cerebral or precious. Here’s a version of the perfect beach house library –

complete works of John le Carre & Ian Fleming,

rows of New Directions and Open Letter paperbacks

Philippe Claudel

Cesar Aira

Haruki Murakami

Roberto Bolano

Umberto Eco

some nonfiction books on World War 2 (because, for some unexplainable reason, even people who aren’t interested in history will read about WWII).

a copy of HhHH by Laurent Binet, perhaps?

back-issues of The Paris Review

every Calvin & Hobbes paperback collection ever published.

Alain Mabanckou

anything written by or about a Mitford sister

Moby Dick

The library may just exist in my imagination, but I’m working on a personalized bookplate (with a note on where to return lost books) as a surprise housewarming gift.

If Dan Simmon’s Drood is to be believed, and I can’t imagine why not, Charles Dickens would leave specially chosen books on the bedside tables of overnight guests.

Continuing on with the theme – on my journeys through the internet I discovered THE PRIVATE LIBRARY and Jumel Terrace Books. Kurt Thometz curates and develops libraries for the rich and famous in NYC, with a client list that includes Diana Vreeland, Calvin Klein, Fran Lebowitz and Diane Sawyer. His blog, though not updated as much as I’d like (pot meet kettle!), is filled with fascinating insights on books, book collecting and the inexhaustible topic of cataloging and organization. Any bibliophile worthy of the name should have this page bookmarked. As for Jumel Terrace – it’s a bookshop in Harlem that specializes in local history (by which I think they mean Harlem), African and African-American subjects/literature. It’s also a Bed & Breakfast that shares an entrance with the bookshop.

The guestroom at our house has a fully stocked bookcase. I’m in trouble if someone ever starts a book and then *shudder* wants to take it home to finish.

I know it’s an oddball topic. Still. Have you ever stayed at a hotel, inn, b&b or just a friend’s house that had an amazing library?